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THE BACK OFFICE
the
manager
WINTER 2011
best sports programme of the year at
the
Broadcast
awards (for its coverage
of the FA Cup final and rugby’s
Premiership final) and is being talked
about as a serious competitor to Sky
when the Barclays Premier League
negotiates its next three-year deal.
“It shows we’ve come a long way
in a very short period of time,”
Hornett says. “Even though we had
support from the rest of the ESPN
network, we were effectively a start-
up. We had to be credible.”
The first step to credibility for a
broadcast operation, beyond logistics,
is in the talent – the presenters,
commentators and pundits – which,
Hornett explains, is one of his primary
priorities on a daily basis.
“An enormous amount of emphasis
is put on our talent,” he says. “They
are part of our brand, they are
integral to what we do, so we think
very carefully about who is going to
commentate, what team we are going
to put around each game.”
Big name presenters such as John
Champion and Ray Stubbs are
important, naturally, but almost
more important, Hornett says, is
that those names are appropriate to
the audience and that they inspire
trust in the content.
“When you are choosing people
to present or commentate, firstly
they need to have a passion for
the subject and they should have
opinions, but secondly they should
be somebody who people at home
feel comfortable watching,” he says.
“You need a mixture of characters
and a mixture of strengths and
experience. It’s something I think
about all the time.”
Equally important is the content,
something the ESPN team take
extremely seriously, albeit in ways
that sometimes make it seem
anything but serious.
“Serve the fan… that’s our
motto,” says Hornett. “We take
sport very seriously, but we don’t
take ourselves too seriously, so we
try to capture the emotion of events,
take the fan to places where they
want to go and ask the questions
that the fans want asked.”
This fan-orientated approach,
which Hornett believes marks ESPN
out from its broadcasting rivals, is
also what drives the channel’s plans
for the future.
In July 2009
, following a hastily-
arranged auction as Setanta went
down in flames, the world-renowned
American broadcaster ESPN won the
rights to screen 46 Barclays Premier
League matches for the 2009/10
football season. But there was one
crucial problem – there was no UK
channel to show them on.
Enter Andrew Hornett, the brains
behind Sky Sports’
Soccer Saturday
,
who was charged with creating a
channel, more or less from scratch,
in time for the season’s kick off in
the following month.
“Under normal circumstances you’d
have 18 months to launch a channel...
we had six weeks,” says Hornett.
“There was no studio, no presenters,
nothing in the schedule, a blank piece
of paper. We had to put everything
together very, very quickly.”
Hornett, who, as senior executive
producer, is in charge of everything
from presenters to content to identity,
set about creating a team to cover
football from the Barclays Premier
League, the FA Cup, Scottish Premier
League, Serie A, the Bundesliga,
Major Soccer League and more.
“I think we have more football
on our channel than any other
channel,” he says. “So football is top
of the tree, it’s bound to be.”
The result is that in just two years
since its launch, ESPN UK has
received two nominations for the
from a standing start – and in the face of stiff competition – the uk division of the us
sports broadcasting giant has already become a serious contender
words
Alexandra Willis
“We try to
take football
fans to the
places where
they want
to go”
46
47
matters
Media
Andrew Hornett, ESPN UK